Pardoning Arpaio under these circumstances is a gross affront to the principle of the rule of law. Arpaio flagrantly violated explicit constitutional rights, and then violated judicial orders to stop. To allow him to go unpunished is to celebrate the arbitrary use of state violence and to show contempt for the legal restraints public officials are supposed to be constrained by. As former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger tweeted, when Trump says that Arpaio was convicted for "just doing his job," this means that according to Trump, Arpaio's job "was violating a federal court order," and his pardon is therefore "an assault on law itself."

Some have said that Trump used the media's distraction with the immanent natural disaster in Texas as "cover" for the Arpaio pardon, but Trump's not that bright, and the media does have the ability to report on more than one thing at a time.

The pardon statement issued by the White House this evening was brief, and damningly so. Assume that a president wishes to issue a pardon he knows to be controversial. This seems to be such a case: the pardon of a law enforcement officer convicted of willfully defying a court order, issued only weeks after the court decision and well before the appeal the lawyers announced or any sentencing. It would seem that in exercising the power the President would anticipate the questions his highly unusual and controversial pardon raises and attempt to answer them. An example of such an undertaking is George H.W. Bush’s 1,346-word statement explaining the pardon of the Iran-Contra defendants. This White House could muster in the Arpaio case only two paragraphs paying tribute to the former Sheriff’s “service” to the nation and citing his age (85)...

It all seems to come down to that: Trump disrupted the operation of the criminal justice process to score a political point, and he believes that the “complete power to pardon” gives him all the space he needs for this maneuver and requires of him only the most pro forma, meaningless explanation of his action. He has managed, however, to make a very clear statement about the “rule of law” in his government, and he has miscalculated if he somewhat imagines that it will not come back to haunt him.

In a statement written in the first person, published on the front pages of state newspapers and read on national television, Mr. Kim called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” who had “denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world.”

Mr. Kim vowed to take the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”

In a country where the leader is essentially portrayed as a god, Mr. Kim’s decision to respond personally to Mr. Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly and pledge reprisals escalated the standoff over the North’s nuclear program in a way that neither he nor his predecessors had done before.

...I have heard, first-hand, from Republican senators, representatives, and other dignitaries that they view Donald Trump as a menace in his current role. It’s not (just) that they disagree with some of what he does. It’s that they consider him intellectually unaware of the cliffs toward which he is steering the country, and temperamentally unable to exercise anything like mature judgment. In these and other ways, including his personal and financial ethics, they know that he is outside the range of suitability to hold this job.

This is a philosophical revulsion against the very idea of a social safety net. The president* may be acting out of id-based contempt and bone-deep ignorance. But the support he's getting for his actions from all the people who otherwise are laughing at him behind his back and hoping that he doesn't start World War III in such a way that it can be hung on them in the next election is deliberate and calculated. It is a premeditated catastrophe visited on people whom Paul Ryan believes in the darkness of his soul and in the shadows of his mind do not deserve the help of the government of which they are a part. They just found a useful hatchetman to serve an agenda of ruthless sadism.

So the answer to the question posed at the end of my previous comment is "never."

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